Protip: running programs to check somebody else’s computers for critical security holes, without asking permission first, is most definitely a crime. By the way, anyone trying to tell you that NSA has been using the known OpenSSL “Heartbleed” bug for a long time had better be careful, since the bug has only existed for so long. Of course, who seriously trusts ‘anonymous sources’ in this day and age? Those are what they use to hit Republicans, so why should we trust them now?

Have you heard about The Weather Channel trying to force Dish Network to buy its programming? Yes, they actually want the Obama administration to force that to happen. They claim it’s a public service, except ratings are falling and they don’t even do exclusively weather anymore. Guys, it’s 2014: People get the weather on the Internet and on their phones. Nobody needs to watch cable TV for weather anymore. We must not use government to subsidize this buggy whip manufacturer.

Why is Amazon winning? It’s not Sales Tax. It’s because Amazon is doing everything they can to combine their great selection with getting your purchases to you as fast as possible. That patent going around for predictive shipping is being reported so terribly. People keep focusing on getting something at your house you didn’t order. That’s not the real point of the patent. Figures 4A-4C of Patent No. 8,615,473 B2 demonstrate the real goal. They want to get items that are likely to be ordered into the networks of their package carriers, down to the local hub or first three digits of ZIP code, then slap on the address of a specific person who did order it, and get the item to the person insanely fast.

I know I’ve harped on this a lot, but it really is a shame that people in favor of sales tax changes have made this all about sticking it to Amazon, because there are legitimate tax reasons to favor taxing interstate purchases. Preserving sales tax revenue that used to be there means not having to raise or implement income taxes in order to get the same revenue per capita.

The argument for the ECPA (email warrant law) reform in a nutshell: because a lot of people store important data on other people’s servers, we need to tighten warrant laws for that data. I don’t buy the necessity, especially with FISA also under attack. If terrorists have data on Google’s servers, I want Google to be able to hand over that data. But this idea is popular and I expect it to pass eventually.

Sorry for missing Tech at Night on Friday. After that near-miss with a cold, I decided to start the weekend a little early that night. But we’re back. So with five days of news to catch up on, let’s see what we have here.

While the above-linked criticisms are legitimate, it is the case that not that all privacy criticisms of CISPA are legitimate. “Privacy” has become the vague catch-all for left-libertarian positions that “for the children” has become for progressives. All too often there’s no actual meat to the criticisms. Heck, half the people complaining about privacy would tell you that CISPA is the new SOPA, when the two bills are entirely unrelated. It’s baseless scaremongering designed to defeat Republican efforts and clear the field for Jay Rockefeller and Barack Obama to act.

I do plan to say more very soon on CISPA, explaining why we should pass the bill. Watch RedState.